Master of the microbleep, Mark Fell, seems to release an album every few weeks. ‘Manutushi’, released in March, is less mind-boggling than either of the releases that emerged late last year, ‘UL8’ and ‘Multistability’, but despite being largely given to slow oscillating wave-forms, there are occasional rapid-fire bleeps that are liable to induce involuntary blinking at a very fast pace.
The use of voices – sped up, pitch-shifted, sometimes speaking in foreign languages – only heightens the sense of otherness, and if one might expect their presence to bring a greater sense of humanity to Fell’s typically clinical sound spectrum, the precise opposite is true. There’s just no easy access route into this album.
‘Periodic orbit of dynamic system related to a knot’, released on 29th November, is rather different from the other Mark Fell releases I’ve been exposed to, in that it comprises just two tracks, each with a running time of 23 minutes and 16 seconds, rather than a large number of short, fragmentary pieces segued together. It also incorporates more abrasive sounds and a more overt sense of rhythm. There’s even something approximating a snare sound smacking away repetitively during the first minutes of ‘This’ side.
|
There’s a strange and nigglesome sense of deja vu as movements are repeated in various permutations a number of times across the two tracks, while at other times single notes are blasted in such relentless and close repetition that it feels more like torture than music. Of course, hat’s pretty much Fell’s modus operandi: to push notes and frequencies not only to, but far beyond, their limits. His work is as much about the process as the end result.
I have to admire his singular commitment to his chosen path of experimentalism: there’s no-one else doing anything like this as far as I’m aware, and certainly, no-one is doing it with the kind of fervent and obsessive attention to detail. However, I do have to admit that listening to his albums is hard work and likely to try anyone’s patience: listening to one in its entirety in a single sitting is often beyond even my capacity.
Mark Fell Online
|
